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Bonus Season for Baseball

Perhaps politicians serving out their last days in office should be urged to do as little as possible. Certainly former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani did not do the city any favors when he fell into the trap of trying to wrap up deals for new Mets and Yankees baseball stadiums a few days before stepping down.

New York City was not the same place when Mr. Giuliani left office that it had been even six months before. No one knew that better than the departing mayor. Yet shortly before leaving, Mr. Giuliani announced a $1.6 billion deal for new stadiums to which the city -- already struggling with heavy debt -- would contribute $800 million in tax-exempt bonds. The state would have to spend an additional $390 million on transportation. It is left to Michael Bloomberg, Mr. Giuliani's successor, to back away from plans New York cannot afford.

The deal is not binding on Mr. Bloomberg. But recently he discovered that Mr. Giuliani had bequeathed the Yankees a 60-day opt-out for use anytime after this year if Mayor Bloomberg refused to agree to it. The previous leases gave the team the choice of bailing out after the next season or committing for five more seasons to staying in New York.

Of course, a 60-day release may not be easy for the Yankees to actually carry off, since it would take a while for somebody else to build them a new stadium. And many observers believe that the owner George Steinbrenner would never really leave the lucrative New York media market. But at the least, Mr. Giuliani has managed to give Mr. Steinbrenner new leverage to use when the city tries to negotiate a more sensible agreement.

And what did New Yorkers get in return? Robert Harding, the former deputy mayor who negotiated this deal for Mr. Giuliani, has said that these leases give the new mayor ''breathing room'' so that he would not have to negotiate with the Yankees shortly after taking office. This presumes that Mr. Bloomberg, who had enough negotiating skill to create a multibillion-dollar corporation, would not have been up to hammering out a better deal than the one Mr. Harding came up with. Frankly, that is hard to imagine.

The Mets also get their share of the helpful fine print, including a pass on having to pay off a disputed bill to the city for over $80,000 from cable and ad revenues. And both teams get up to $25 million more in ''planning money,'' presumably since all the other millions the city has given these teams for planning have already been spent. The city comptroller, William Thompson, who released these documents this week, has said that the city will not have enough authority to audit how the newest planning money will be used.

Mr. Giuliani, as mayor, never made it a secret that he had a thing about baseball. He even subverted the city's charter revision process when he wanted a Yankee stadium on Manhattan's West Side, a dream that slipped from him during his eight-year term, which ended in December. But the combination of his emotional attachment to the sport and his desire to leave an imprint on the city in the form of big new stadiums seems to have warped his judgment. He made a poor choice for his final big act as mayor, and it will be up to Mayor Bloomberg to find a way to negotiate more sensible deals with the two teams.